Around South Yorkshire, Barnsley, Cudworth,Grimethorpe, northwards to just short of Pontefract, it is not unusual at al to hear words such as,
Laik(pro- lake to play or take part)
Thee
Thou
Shalt
Ye
Theesen(yourself)
Snap(food)
Rammy- smelly pungent,rotten
Siling, raining
Spell - splinter of wood
Used along with some words that are pronounced very differantly today after the great vowel shift.
You will find many of these have Northern European origins that are still in use in those countries today.
We still use the hard vowels in a few words just as they used to be pronounced,
Water is still often said as wat-ter for example, washing as in laundry is pronounced weshin, there are other peculiarites such as calling everyone ‘luv’, male or female, no matter what the gender of the speaker.
It does seem to me that the lower down the social scale you go, the more of these old words have been preserved, in the Northeast words like ducal(dog), parne(rain), mort(woman), deek(look) are in normal everyday usage but moreso in the lower echelons such as on the council estates, and among prisoners with whom I work.
Language has always been political, riven by class and social standing in the UK and there has always been a social pressure to speak the correct way, the further down the pile you go, the less people are inclined to jump through such hoops, not having much to gain from doing so.
I think this is a gross simplification. It was not Hadrian’s Wall that explains the continued existance of Celtic tongues, but rather the fact they existed on a geographically difficult fringe of Europe. Hadrian’s Wall could only isolate as long as it consisted of Roman armies. Once they left it may have had some occasional stategic use, but certainly wasn’t holding back social and lingusitic migration.
Germanic languages happily expanded their influence beyond Hadrian’s Wall both prior to and after the Romans. There’s nothing to suggest they didn’t do so during as well. At times they extended more to the extent of Antonine’s wall, which was little more than a ditch. All rather points to the linguistic insignificance of both walls and more of a case of the Romans recognising geography that made for a convenient border.
> Oh, and Winston. That thing about combining words is not unique to Danish. It goes for all the Scandinavian lanuages.
Let me respectably quote myself a bit:
> I must regrettably admit that many other (albeit inferior) languages also have that ability
…and then perhaps suggest that in the future you read the whole post before you respond to it. And then while we’re on the subject; it’s hardly limited to Scandinavian languages to make compound words, I think to some degree most Germanic languages do so, as well as many other languages. There is a myth that Greenland Eskimos have some 50 words for snow; I dimly remember having heard the myth originated because their language combined their word for snow with many other words; hard snow -> hardswon. This was misunderstood as separate words; which of course of a sort they were.
> You know, us which you call ‘Asia’ with a sneer.
Hmmm… who are you people who are all called Asia, I always thought Asia was a continent, good thing you’re fighting ignorance here because here’s a thing I didn’t have a clue about. Also I don’t recall sneering at anyone?? Actually this whole sentence leaves my totally perplexed???
Compound words are a hallmark of the Germanic language group, but the fact that we don’t run the words together in English is just a matter of spelling and writing. I would assert that “car door handle” is, syntactically speaking, just as much a single word as Autotuerhandgriff, we just continue to leave the spaces in when writing it down. Romance languages such as French use non-compound consructions such as Poigne de porte a l’automobile (forgive my poor French, but the point still holds). The fact that the Germanic style of word compounding is still a vital part of the English language is one of the strongest arguements for it being in the Germanic group, despite all the Norman French influence.
Having said that, I think that compound words do not add to the size of a language. What does add to the size are nuances of meaning expressed by different words. For example, in English you can say that “Event C was caused by Events A and B”,
or you can say "Event C was occasioned by Events A and B, meaning that Events A and B didn’t directly and actively cause Event C to happen, but set the stage for Event C in an indirect way.
In the Monty Python Cheese Shop sketch, it says in the books that John Cleese is supposed to be speaking Yorkshire dialect, and I’ve never quite understood what he’s saying. When he says, “Ee were all hungry-like”, does the “Ee were” mean the same thing as “I was” in Standard English? I always suspected so.
First of all the discussion is pretty stupid considering that we can not compare two different languages with precission.
A quick search at my library says that the largest language is 1)English, 2) Portuguese 3) Spanish 4) French 4) Latin 5) Italian
How did I arrive at such conclussion? Easily considering the size of my dictionaries.
But the problem is that my spanish dictionary is pretty bad, the english one is excelent, the portuguese and Latin are Italian-Spanish and Latin-Spanish, and the Italian one it’s the worst excuse for killing a tree ever (not considering everything Tom Clancy ever wrote).
Therefore we have to be more precise about what do we consider words from a certain language. Example:
Everyone knows that spanish as all romance languages are, in the words of Jorge Luis Borges, “Vulgar Latin”. Then do we consider part of the spanish language the huge amount of words stolen from: Arab, French, Italian, English and to a much lesser extent the contribution of the New wWorld languages such as guarani, quichua, etc?
In the case of the spanish spoken in Argentina the influence of Italian due to the inmigration (43% of argentinians descends from italians) is gigantic.
Compose words are not privative of scandinavian languages, the same happen in spanish, do we count them too?
And besides as I constantly remind myself, size does not matter so let’s open another thread which is the better language?
It’s a little misleading to say that English has the largest vocabulary of all languages if the typical English speaker doesn’t have knowledge of all those words. Language does not reside in a dictionary; it lives in the people who speak it. It doesn’t matter if English has a million words in a dictionary if 99% of English speakers only know 20,000-30,000 of them. Find the language where the active vocabulary of its speakers is larger than any other, and that is your largest language.
Of course, comparing languages with word counts is almost insulting. It reduces something awe-inspiring to a mere obsession with counting. It misses the beauty of language so completely that… there aren’t words.
Well, that’s not exactly true. Language isn’t really an invention and it’s anything but messy. It’s highly systematic… complexity is not messiness. Even language change (which most people ignorantly think of as deterioration) tends to follow patterns.
I don’t count imported words that still retain their foreign identity…for example…to say something is passe is fine in english and it has not been changed one bit. I don’t consider it an english word, it just usage in the english language…much how the term “OK” is used in nearly every language in the world that has had contact with our media…seriously, listen to some foreign people speaking their native language and you’ll hear “Ok” in amongst all the native words…probably waaaay in the future this discussion will be silly as there will be a common language that everyone speaks, perhaps native languages will still be spoken but not as much in a divided way as now…who knows what that language may be…most probably an english based language seeing as how pervasive english is and has become the standard language for trade. But as with all things, that could easily change with the course of time…once upon a time Latin was THE language and you can see how that went.
I accept the challenge lucwarm: Rápido, ligero, veloz, fuerte, apurado, presuroso, apresurado. I got 7 (as you) but consider that I don’t have a synonym dictionary (Spanish does have that kind of dictionaries, my library doesn’t).
Search: http://www.diccionario.com , it’s not necessarily the best out there, but it’s a good starting point for Spanish synonyms (and general translation).
Interesting question and interesting thread, including the various digressions into various versions and revisions of English history (not to mention the emminently gentlemanly retractions and apologies issued by **Derleth **. If only every poster would so quickly and easily admit his/her mistakes!)
Anyway, there seems to be pretty general consensus for the basic claim that English has the most words, based on the size of the O.E.D. or Merriam-Webster’s or whatever, and tacit acknowledgment that we’re not likely to get very far in nailing down exactly what that number is, because language is so hard to define, complex, rapidly shifting, and so on. But I did find myself intrigued by **hazel-rah’s ** question about how many words the average native speaker of a language knows–
I wonder if anyone can help to shed some light on this?
A semi-related question that occurs to me has to do with language development. Child development books like to use benchmark figures for determining whether a child is developing within ‘normal’ standards, i.e., by the age of 2, he should have a speaking vocabulary of this many words; by the age of 3, this many words, and so on. My question is, do these totals for given ages vary from one language to the next? In other words, do pediatricians in China or France have different figures to quote when citing patterns of normal development for the average 2 or 3 or 10 year old? And what might be these totals for the average 21 year old in different languages?
And if the working vocabulary of the average English speaker is in fact significantly larger than that of native speakers of other languages, when do we start outstripping their rate of new word acquisition? As toddlers? early elementary? or is it later?
Then there’s also a notion I’ve frequently seen expressed that only a very small vocabulary is necessary for perhaps 95% of our communications. I wonder whether or not the size of each language’s ‘essential vocabulary list’ is roughly the same. Are English speakers expected to know 7 synonyms for ‘fast’, whereas in other languages the 95% list might include only 3?
Can’t find anything on the question from The Master… perhaps we should ask?
I participated in discussions on this subject many times in my Linguistics classes at university… word counts are extremely difficult (don’t expect a consensus anytime soon), comparison of word counts across languages are almost impossible (the definition of a “word” between languages… tricky).
Again, it depends on what you call a “word.” The more languages you compare, the more meaningless the definition is going to become. But my guess based on what I’ve learned about child language acquisition is that things would progess at about the same pace. Most people don’t judge children’s linguistic ability by lexicon size alone… I can’t imagine asking a three-year-old to recite every word they know once a month so I could keep track. It’s easier to make estimates of progress based on their ability with syntax, sentence length, irregular verbs and plurals, etc. Very language-specific.
I have never seen estimates of the active vocabulary size of speakers of other languages besides English. I’d be interested to know.
If the working vocabulary of the average English speaker is significantly larger (I personally doubt that it is) it probably happens after childhood and is tied to education and literacy. The US and the UK are very literate societies (although not the most literate… probably Japan or a Northern European country).
Well, this probably has to do with how many words you need to know to usefully speak a second language… I seem to remember it being around 3,000-4,000 words, but that may be from an ad for a language course, not actual research. I’ll see what I can find.
hazel-rah–You’re a champ. And that’s a very interesting and apropos article you’ve linked to (above). Now I’m off to read the thread you referenced. Thanks for those and anything else you come up with.
[aside:] note how deftly and comfortably I’ve dropped two prepositions in the immediately preceding sentence and started the sentence before that with a conjunction–all this in a thread about how impressive the English language is. It’s nice to have a graduate degree in English and be able to get away with things like this. [/aside]
The concept of a “listeme” is used by Pinker in The Language Instinct to denote a vocabulary item that is learned in its own right.
This is a more useful concept than that of a “word”, which is partly a typographical convention of which characters are separated by spaces in the written language.
To take the earlier example of “car door handle”. This is not (at least for me) a listeme, since it is cobbled together at need from three linguistic atoms which determine its meaning. On the other hand, a phrasal verb like “put up with” may well be a listeme, although it is written as three words, since its meaning is unrelated to its component parts and so it must be learned in its own right.
Pinker argues that most claims for how many listemes are in use by any individual are gross underestimates, and we should reckon in the tens of thousands.
I doubt that the question is meaningless, whatever definition of “word” is agreed - if a corpus is assembled of two different languages, using the same kinds of sources for each, you may well find that one language has many more words than the other.
The only thing I found wrong with the article from hazel-rah…how can the writer consider medical terminology english? just because we use it in english doesn’t suddenly make the medical terminology no longer Latin. I mean, c’mon…if we take this as a precedent then the “language” of mathmatics should for the most part count as arabic since they developed a lot of our fundamental geometry and algebra. But I sincerely doubt that would ever be considered…or another example…a lot of english speakers use the term Ciao…does that make the italian word now an english one? I don’t think so…it is merely english speakers using a foreign word…it doesn’t make it a part of the “english” vocabulary IMHO of course.
Well, yes, it does make them English words if English speakers use them frequently enough. Think of words as not being so much foreign or native as being on a continuum between foreign and native… some are closer to one end or the other.
Many words you probably think of as unquestionably English were foreign words at some point in the past. If you deny that words can ever make the jump from foreign to native, then speakers of all languages (and English in particular!) have a lot of explaining to do.
As for hibernicus, I should say I’m very inclined to pay attention to what Pinker says. But the estimates I’ve seen for the size of an average English speaker’s lexicon vary from 20,000 to 150,000, so I just don’t know. That’s a pretty huge margin of error.
What would it mean if one language had more words than another?
